Someone show me how to make a simple saltwater change station?

godzen

New member
I'm a terrible DIY or at least, have absolute no experience with plumbing or parts. I just need a simple yet a effective way to transfer water from a reservoir in the garage to the tank that is approx. 40 ft apart. I have already bought 2x 32gal brute trash bin. My idea is to have two simple Brute trash bin, one for holding fresh ro/di water so there's always fresh water avail. I need plumping done so that I can just open a valve and let this water draining into a second bin either via a pump or gravity. The second bin is use to mix saltwater. After that, I need plumbing setup so that I can pump this freshly mixed saltwater into my tank. Now, I have an eheim compact 2000+ pump that can max 520gph. I can buy another mag if necessary

If someone can email me their instructions, or have link that show step by step and the exact part I can buy from home depot, that would really help me out. I've already read through the SW change station thread and to be honest, some of them look so darn complex. Even the easy ones look a little intimidating since I know next to nothing about plumbing but I guess I need to start somewhere...


p.s if you have an even easier suggestion, feel free to let me know
 
I'm not familiar with the pump you have but I use a maxi jet to transfer from the freshwater tank to the saltwater. Then you need a pump that will be able to handle a 40ft run plus head height to the tank. Good luck
 
I just use a mag 7 pump and a long piece of polyflow tubing. It's about 50'. I turn off the return pump and pump the water out of the tank and then take the same pump and tubing and drop the pump into my premixed salt water and run the tubing to the Dt and pump the water in. When I'm finished I roll up the tubing and put it all away. It's pretty straight forward and simple.

If you want to go automated then you could get yourself a controller and a couple of peristaltic dosing pumps. Get an ATO that can be managed by the controller. One dosing pump is set up to move water from the sump to a drain and the other is set up to move premixed salt water from a storage tank to the sump. The way it would work is you would program the controller to turn off the ATO and then turn on the Peristaltic pumps preferably removing a gallon of water and then the other one kicks on and replaces it. Then the controller would stop the process and turn the ATO back on. This could be done daily resulting in a 30gal water change per month in small increments. Your only hands on would be to mix up the saltwater on a monthly basis with the right storage container. I'm considering setting this system up myself. The reason to use the Peristaltic pumps is that the process would be slower, quieter and more controlled. Sorry I don't have a step by step but it is food for thought :)
 
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